Hollow Knight: Silksong was one of the most anticipated game launches of 2025, shoring up enough excitement that other indie game developers postponed launches to avoid being overshadowed, and Steam’s servers crashed on launch day. Despite this, Ari Gibson, co-founder of Team Cherry, the studio behind the Hollow Knight franchise, said in a recent Bloomberg
interview that there are other things the development outfit would rather make. Team Cherry is still working on ambitious content updates for Silksong, although the studio is notorious for its long development timelines. When asked about whether the studio’s next game release would be a Hollow Knight game, Gibson said that “We have said we’ll go elsewhere as well. Although we’ve also said those experiences will still be about exploring big worlds full of weird characters and giant bosses and whatnot.”
Gibson continued that “That’s not to say we won’t return to these Hollow Knight worlds. We do have ideas around what forms those would take. But we also don’t want to be exclusively people that make Hollow Knight.” But it’s not all bad news for Hollow Knight fans. One of the motivations for Team Cherry’s desire to pursue other universes and new characters is passion—it would open up new creative possibilities and could have an interesting effect on the storytelling or the outcome. Gibson and his Team Cherry co-founder, William Pellen, were also asked about what they thought of people modding Silksong to tweak damage, add difficulty sliders, and the response was that “the fact that people are modding it is totally fine,” with Gibson going on to explain that, even though tweaking difficulty runs counter to the game’s approach to problem-solving, keeping it difficult forces the developers to think creatively and create alternatives for players when impassable obstacles appear. This outlook and acceptance of the modding community is somewhat refreshing, especially compared to instances where game developers and distributors have taken down game mods and removed access to mod tools.
